A task-dependent approach to minimum-deflection fixtures

Presents an approach to planning minimum-deflection fixtures for tasks whose characteristics are well understood. Based on an accurately defined notion of deflection, we define a quality measure that characterizes the workpiece's deflection with respect to a set of external wrenches determined by the tasks. A scheme is proposed to model task wrenches, which can be used for practical manufacturing operations. This task modelling scheme is then used to obtain a convenient formulation of the task-dependent quality measure, which allows the quality measure to be efficiently computed. An example is presented to show that our approach can be effectively employed for planning compliant fixtures that are best suited to specified tasks.